At long last, Google announces SMS for Hangouts

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Google held a web event today to discuss the new features being brought to their social networking platform. One of the things that they glossed over early on was SMS support finally coming to Hangouts.

It feels like ages ago that Google decided to merge its communications platforms into a single experience. The launch of Hangouts was exciting, but ultimately wasn’t the big unified system everyone was hoping for, at least at first. SMS was missing, which seemed odd since Google Voice is service that hasn’t been kept up to date like some of their other apps. Google promised that the service was on the way, and we’ve heard very little since that point. Today, however, we finally know the update is coming.

Google’s next update to Hangouts will include support for GIFs, location sharing, and SMS. Each of these features will operate with mobile devices and the desktop browser experience just as seamlessly as the rest of the service. Receiving an SMS in Hangouts will show up just like all other messages, with a tiny icon next to the photo of the sender that lets you know where the message came from.

It’s unclear if there will be any real differences in how the SMS messages are treated once you are inside the message, but fortunately we won’t have to wait too long to find out.

SMS Hangouts will be rolling out throughout the rest of the week for iOS and Android devices as an update to the existing app.